12 - Conclusion: Recalling the Hybrid Revolutionary

Summary

Latour (1999) famously engaged in ‘recalling’ Actor–Network Theory (ANT) years after it was introduced to social theory – using but then also characteristically subverting a metaphor borrowed from the automotive industry in relation to faulty cars. Ideas cannot really be recalled like cars once they are out in the world, and they start to act in and on the world. Therefore, Latour argued, the best one can do is not to abandon the creature one has created but ‘continue all the way in developing its strange potential’ (Latour, 1999, p. 24). At the end of this book, we are at a different situation – we can, for now, recall the notion of the hybrid revolutionary developed at the outset of this project and then confronted with a variety of empirical matter. What does this recalling suggest about its future potential for enquiring how political orders are subverted – and maintained on diverse scales, from local to global? How does our car perform after driving some strange ways, and what it can do in the world?

The notion of the hybrid revolutionary employed in this volume seeks to illuminate the paradox of movements that aim to reorder the political order radically by means of revolutionary practice, yet do so by recoding and repurposing, rather than rejecting the constitutive norms and everyday management practices of this order. The fundamental assumption underlying analysis of the political dynamics investigated in this volume, not particularly revolutionary in itself within the realm of philosophy and social theory, is that there are no pure forms. The basic perspective, inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and dialogical encounters with it, enables us to unpack this impurity (‘hybridity’) and theorise revolutionary processes in global politics today.

Revolutionaries in the modern epochal time frame are, we propose, nomadic war machines occupying the milieu of exteriority outside the enclosed space of the state. They are bodies without organs, resisting the interiorisation function of the state which encloses, measures and regulates. Where the state acts to preserve its organs, war machines are after destruction – yet turned into an experimental, creative movement.